Teacher Ollie’s Takeaways is a weekly post (and sometimes a podcast!) bringing together all of the fascinating things that Ollie read throughout the week! Find all past posts of Teacher Ollie’s Takeaways here,

Sensitive Instruction of English

Really enjoyed this episode of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. It can be a challenge to know how to correct the culturally-based idiosyncrasies in our students’ speech in a culturally-sensitive way. Jennifer Gonzales and Dena Simmons discuss how to do this with both respect and finesse. Well worth a listen!

Challenging the fallacious Fact/Value divide in Education Research

I’m naturally a very quantitatively driven guy. I seem to be drawn to numerical metrics of success, sometimes missing the forest for the trees. Something I’ve been exploring a lot recently is the assumptions underlying much educational research. Here’s just one of the blog posts that I’ve found stimulating in this space in the last few weeks. I’ll hopefully blog more about this in the not too distant future.

A great read for anyone who, like me, is (willingly?) caught in the direct instruction echo chamber. https://t.co/ObMmKR6RyL

The one side asserts the importance of facts and thinks you cannot argue rationally using evidence about values so excludes them from science, the other side asserts the importance of values and agrees that these cannot be put on a proper research footing so exclude themselves from science. But what if the claim introduced so casually by Hume nearly 300 years ago is simply wrong? What if we can derive values from an investigation of the facts?

And values are always present

Values enter into research when we select what to look at, when we decide how to look at it and when we interpret the meaning of what we think we see.(Standish, 2001). So values are always implicit behind ‘experimental designs’.

Double loop learning!

My suggestion from this example is that what appears to many researchers as an unbridgeable divide between facts and values within educational research is perhaps better understood as the real difference in quality and temporality of these two intertwined research loops. On the one hand focused empirical research within a theoretical framework that embeds values and on the other hand the rather larger and rather longer dialogue of theory that can question and develop the assumptions of research frames. Both loops can be seen as united in a larger conception of science as collective ‘wissenshaft’ or shared knowledge. Both call upon evidence from experience and both make arguments that seek to persuade. While research findings from the smaller loops of empirical science based on narrow frameworks of assumptions can seem to progress faster and be more certain for a while than the findings of the larger borderless transdisciplinary shared enquiry of humanity this is an illusion because in fact the cogency of the assumptions behind narrow research programmes depend upon justifications that can only be made within the larger dialogue.

This boils down to the fact that we need to ask ourselves… ‘more efficient at what?’

Google Drive Tools for Teachers

Addressing issues of cultural and political sensitivity in the classroom

This article is well worth a read! Here are some of my favourite quotes…

“When it feels more partisan, we walk more of a tightrope. For the ‘alt-right,’ I didn’t feel we had to walk a tightrope,” said Leslie, who viewed teaching about the alt-right as akin to teaching about the KKK. Racism ought to be a non-partisan subject, she said.

Learning about the alt-right, for example, is a lesson in political literacy. Teachers should not ask students to decide whether the alt-right is a good thing, but they can teach how it came about and how it has affected the political system, Hess said.